Good Lovins
Upon finishing Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of efficiency guru Amory Lovins in the latest New Yorker, I found myself merrily humming Johnny Mercer's 'Accentuate the Positive'. Talk about 'latching on to the affirmative,' Lovins -- founder of the Rocky Mountain Insitute, coiner of the term 'negawatt' and author of Winning the Oil Endgame -- is an irrepressible optimist, and the effect of the piece was to make me feel hopeful despite myself. I say that because, honestly, optimism is not my normal turn of mind. Fair or not, my tendency is to view a sanguine outlook as the mark of dim-wittedness and/or a delusional disorder. What makes Lovins different is a genius IQ combined with a solutions-oriented, can-do attitude. He may wear rose-colored glasses, but he wears them like a welder wears a welding mask, in order to get down to work, fixing stuff. "I don't do problems," he tells Kolbert. "I do solutions." No Mr. In-Between there and, judging from the profile, no mere Pollyana either.The article is in the Jan. 22 issue and is not available online, but if you hurry you might still snag a copy from the newsstand. It's the cover with George Bush in Nero kit, standing at a flame-licked lectern, strumming a harp.
3 Comments:
I was impressed with Lovins' optimism, and he's very disciplined in his message -- it's always about how we can save energy without sacrificing our standard of living.
What I was struck by, and this is really much broader than Lovins' attitude, is that sacrifice is essentially off the table. We can't even talk about it. It's political suicide.
How did that happen?
In our personal lives, sacrifice is still respected, though certainly not as much as in the past. If you work 18 hour days at a dotcom startup and sleep on the couch in a friend's apartment, and then you succeed, we all applaud that.
But when it comes to huge problems like solving global warming, making sacrifices isn't part of the discussion. Sometimes it seems that if you sacrifice for the greater good, you're a chump.
Even small sacrifices. Jimmy Carter got ridiculed for wearing a sweater to save energy. Is wearing a sweater such a horrible inconvenience?
We hear over and over again that there's no magic bullet when it comes to addressing global warming, that we need to embrace a mix of solutions.
So why is it that sacrifice, even small ones like turning down your heat by a degree or two and wearing another layer of clothing, is hardly ever mentioned as part of the mix?
It's a good point you make, John. I tend to think we always admire voluntary sacrifice but are put off by, for lack of a better word, the *gospel* of sacrifice. We hate to be told what we have to do for vague-sounding moral reasons. Self-improvement, on the other hand, is part of the national mythology.
I don't think our times are all that different. We like to think everyone happily accepted rationing during WWII, but even with Europe and Asia in bloody chaos and our troops dying overseas, it still required an enormous sales job on the part of government propagandists to bring people around to this idea that it was their patriotic duty to do without.
Plus, we shouldn't forget that the sacrifice people made for the war effort was later answered by an orgy of consumption in America that has never really ended. To the victors the spoils and all that....
As for Lovins, it's important to point out that he was adamant in the story about turning the heat down and using compact flourescents and drying his clothes in the sun room. I just don't think he saw any of that as a sacrifice.
Thanks for drawing attention to this interesting New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert. Having done a superb job of covering the reality of climate change, she finds it hard, I imagine, to identify reasons for optimism. It must have been a relief to interview and write about Amory Lovins, and this comes through in the piece.
Certainly for those of us who worry all the time about impending climate doom, reading it was a welcome relief.
What struck me most about Lovins, in his dogged focus on solutions, was his seeming blind spot for the crucial role of public policy. Kolbert tells the story of an economist who tells his grand daughter not to bother to pick up a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "If it were real, somebody would have picked it up already," he says.
For Lovins, she writes, the sidewalk is littered with unclaimed $20 bills -- opportunities to make money by cutting carbon consumption, negawatts and all that.
LOvins is right, of course. But people can't see them. The point is that markets are imperfect. People lack the knowledge to take advantage of these choices, or they lack the incentives to pay the transition and transaction costs.
Right now, for example, my wife and I are shopping for a car. WE would love to buy a hybrid Prius, but will likely end up with a used minivan or small used SUV, to my great shame. I want the Prius; I'm alarmed about global warming, but the extra costs of the Prius are beyhond our reach at present.
Now, if there were high taxes on used minivans, and government rebates for hybrids, we would be there in a minute.
Lovins has a huge collection of workable solutions, which is what makes Kolbert's piece so much fun to read. But he is essentially an inventor and technologist, not a policy maker.
It's up to policymakers, and the voters who drive the politicians, to pick up on Lovins' and others' great ideas and design the necessary incentives for rapid, widespread implementation.
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